Getting ENGAGED: Learning to develop business models

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People need to talk; stakeholders need to network. Both activities are
needed in order to build roadmaps for future directions in the field of active
and healthy ageing.

ENGAGED http://www.engaged-innovation.eu was a thematic
network, funded by the European Commission, that run for over two years. It was
a learning community for sustainable active and healthy ageing that supported
activities among a wide range of actors. Ultimately, ENGAGED’s role was to support the well-known
European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing. Its logo (see Figure 1) drew attention
to a community of people drawn together to support active and healthy ageing,
with a focus on smart technologies and smart dwellings and housing.

Objectives

ENGAGED had seven objectives. They were to:

•Support the process of community building on active
and healthy ageing through an infrastructure that was known as the “European
Community Hub”.

•Identify stakeholder networks and experts on common
learning topics and cluster them into multi-stakeholder coalitions that
facilitated the identification of common actions and the sharing of evidence.

•Establish close relationships with the European Innovation
Partnership Active and Healthy Ageing Marketplace and the Partnership’s Reference Sites.
This ensured that many opportunities for synergies were fully exploited.

•Convene a series of mutual learning workshops.
These workshops enable in-depth exploration of common topics of interest to the
Partnership’s
action groups. They also encouraged capacity-building in less advanced regions and
awareness-raising about the importance of these topics by stakeholders not yet
involved in working on active and healthy ageing.

•Draw up roadmaps for targeted deployment on
these topics and among selected groups of regions as well as processing mapping
the journey so that key steps and lessons for deployment are fully captured for
wider benefit.

•Promote vigorous and healthy growth of the community
by designing and implementing a dissemination and awareness-raising
strategy.

•Establish a long-term co-operation model for a
self-sustaining network.

Mutual CooperationENGAGED brought together many people from different
backgrounds and across a wide range of European countries. Its focus was on
nurturing the emergence of innovative and sustainable active and healthy ageing
services that will make optimal use of technologies.

Stakeholders from the whole active and healthy value
chain participated. As a network of networks, ENGAGED had 15 partners that came
mainly from two backgrounds: they were either specialist European-level
networks active in the field of active and healthy ageing or they were key
regional, research and knowledge partners. Each partner brought access to an
even wider network of people. They did so directly through the people active in
the initiative; through the associations’ members; or through general front-line experience and
skills sets related to community building, digital engagement, research and
analysis. Their interests included domains such as evidence-based deployment,
independent living and user involvement.

Ultimately, ENGAGED gathered together over 150
stakeholders in its network. These actors came from all over Europe: among the
associations represented were organisations from Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. However, they also came from
wider afield, including Guadalupe and Turkey.

Main Engaged ExperiencesTo bring together these stakeholders in dynamic, animated discussions, ENGAGED
organised many different workshops and conferences. These took place in locations
and regions around Europe as far and wide as Bari, Puglia (Italy); Canterbury,
Kent (United Kingdom); Letterkenny, Donegal (Ireland); Santiago de Compostela,
Galicia (Spain); Eindhoven, North Brabant (Netherlands); and Kiruna, Norbotten
(Sweden). These discussions took place too in the context of the European
eHealth Forum in 2014, for example, in Athens, Greece http://ehealth2014.org.

EHTEL had the privilege of hosting one of the project’s major conferences in the context of its
own annual symposium held in Brussels at the end of 2014:

At conferences, such as this one, speakers were often distributed across
several geographic sites. For example, at the EHTEL symposium, contributors
were beamed in from Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain and the Kent Innovation Hub,
Canterbury, Kent to speak to attendees sat physically in the Belgian capital.

The ENGAGED partners also gained experience in the use of social media,
Twitter and YouTube. Among the comments made and re-tweeted about the 2014
conference were:

@ENGAGEDin
Europe: “Today’s event, as part of EHTEL symposium, taking place
simultaneously in Brussels, Barcelona and Kent.”

“Kent team, including Grenoble and Fruili
Italy, listening to user engagement in Barcelona.”

@ENGAGEDinEurope:
“Great
attendance ... today.”

Through this and several other events and activities, ENGAGED was able
to build a useful set of roadmaps for active and healthy ageing in the future.
Key topics included: impact assessment, network sustainability and user
involvement.

EHTEL’s chief learnings on telehealth business models
One of ENGAGED main activities was to build a business-related business
model roadmap. Core elements included new value creation, new roles and new
rules; new social services; and how to achieve buy-in from industry.

EHTEL team members gained a great deal from the experience of working on
business models. The team really appreciated the applicability of Alex
Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur’s business model
canvas to many fields in the broad domain of active and healthy ageing: http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book.

The team has taken the model further in 2015. Its members have built
firstly on the work done on MOMENTUM critical success factors (see http://telemedicine-momentum.eu and Whitehouse (2015)).

Going further, EHTEL has run – with the
Joint Improvement Team in Scotland – a
workshop on the use of business modelling in telehealth and telecare. As the
report from a previous workshop concluded (our emboldening):

“In terms of next steps, it is important for the Technology-Enabled Care Programme to
identify appropriate business cases for the various services involved in
Technology-Enabled Care. The business case(s) – which can include financial as
well as non-financial issues – should enable a focus on specific, well targeted
actions for on-going work on technology-enabled care in Scotland.”